Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjk166 | Hacker News Reader

My settings remain stable and my recommendations are reasonable. If anything I have the opposite problem where I won't watch videos on a certain topic or from a specific channel for a few weeks and then Youtube thinks I never want to see it ever again, even if I've been manually looking for it.

View on HN

> I won't watch videos on a certain topic or from a specific channel for a few weeks and then Youtube thinks I never want to see it ever again

For me it's kind of the converse issue. I watch 2 or 3 videos on a topic and then YouTube thinks I'm obsessed with that topic and nothing else.

This is my experience. Sometimes I think it actually makes me avoid clicking on videos that cover new topics. Especially if it's something gross or weird I'm about to click on out of morbid curiosity. It's like, "hmmm.... do I really want to be spammed with recs for videos on this for the next three weeks?"

I have the same experience but I will also say that designing algo’s and UX to find the right balance between exploring new things and exploiting a topic you’re interested in is no small feat. And doing it effectively for a very diverse user base where your intent in the moment cannot be inferred, compounds the complexity.

It’s very annoying to me that google won’t recommend topics I was into years ago.

Why? If you haven’t showed interested in years, why waste limited pixels when it is highly unlikely to resonate?

A lot of the reason I stopped watching content on those topics is they stopped recommending it. Instead they keep trying to get me to watch the same video over and over

Or serve stuff I already watched. Or gets obsessed over a new channel just because I happened to watch 3 videos I was interested in out of their 50 that I was not

Reply on news.ycombinator.com